


Ringing in the New Year

by darthneko



Series: What Matters Most [10]
Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Drunk and Disorderly, Implied/Referenced Mpreg, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Threesome - M/M/M, Wrynns are trolls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 13:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14978537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthneko/pseuds/darthneko
Summary: "Don’t wait up, you said, there won’t be any trouble."In retrospect, Anduin should have known better.





	Ringing in the New Year

“We’re just going out for drink, you said. Don’t wait up, you said, there won’t be any trouble.”

The words were meant to be as dry as the Tanaris desert, but Anduin couldn’t entirely keep the amusement out of his voice. Two sets of ears twitched upwards to hear it, his mates’ smiles shifting from the sheepish looks he had first laid eyes on to matching broad grins without a trace of repentance anywhere in them. To Anduin’s left Shaw exhaled heavily, the sound purposefully audible and thick with the man’s frustrated disgust.

“In our defense,” the Royal Consort of Stormwind offered cheekily from the wrong side of the bars of a cell in the Stockades, where Ren was sitting on a small heap of dry straw and leaned up against his cousin with as much dignity as he usually reserved for the throne room, “it’s apparently very hard to tell the difference between fur and cloth in dim lighting conditions.”

Shaw made a half strangled sound in his throat. Anduin, under cover of sweeping a disbelieving palm over his face, had to swallow hard and bite his lip to suppress his smile. 

He _should_ , by all rights, have been angry. The night before had been longer than usual - a late dinner and then they’d taken the cubs to the top of the castle tower to watch the first, smaller, firework display set off over the canals. It had been hours to put the children to sleep after that, the three oldest all but vibrating with excitement from the boom and crack of the display. Once they were all safely and finally tucked into bed Anduin had gone back to the tower with his mates and, laughing, clear up to the rooftop, all three of them sliding across the ice cold shingles to perch atop the highest point and watch the final firework show as the Cathedral chimed in the last midnight of the year. 

He’d retreated to bed sometime before the bells chimed two in the morning, and they hadn’t yet rang out the fifth hour of the new day before the head of SI:7 had roused him back out again with the news of an incident involving the Consort, his Guard, and the Stockades. Too little sleep, no food, and stumbling back out into the cold in the pre-dawn light to deal with it - no, by all rights Anduin should have been _furious_. 

Instead, there was a laugh caught up under his ribs that he struggled to swallow down, the sheer ridiculousness of the situation straining his ability to hold onto any semblance of a stern expression. Anduin held out his hand and Shaw obligingly passed over a sheet of the thick rag paper that the guard used for first draft reports and temporary memos. Anduin had already read it while he was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and struggling into a clean shirt, but he made a show of looking over it again.

“Disregarding the charges of drunk and disorderly that three fourths of Stormwind is guilty of and which I’m unanimously pardoning,” he said, casually, “there’s still the issue of unauthorized use of public property-”

“They were already using it when we got there,” Hardwire rumbled. He had his back propped up against the stone slab wall of the cell and there were bits of straw threaded through his hair and beard. 

Anduin pursed his lips for a moment until he could school his expression once more. “Also resistance to the guards-”

“They had _no_ sense of humor,” Ren interjected dryly.

“-and two counts of public indecency,” Anduin finished, folding the sheet over in neat halves with a sharp crease as he looked pointedly at his mates, both of whom were wearing nothing more than their underclothes and the fur they’d been born with.

“Lies,” Hardwire said promptly, his smug grin flashing teeth. “Everyone still had the important bits on.”

“Mostly,” Ren amended. 

Hardwire rubbed at his unscarred ear, scratching idly down his jaw to dislodge a few bits of straw from his beard as he considered that. “Mostly,” he agreed. “Did that pretty little russet fur still have her bra on?” 

“Maybe?” Ren hazarded, though he sounded far from sure. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “The sable furred Worgen calling out the shots didn’t - almost hit me in the face with it when she tossed it from the dais.”

Anduin bit the inside of his lip hard enough to taste a hint of blood drawn too close to the surface in the divot left behind. He could only too well imagine the look of disbelief and suffering on Mathias Shaw’s face and didn’t dare glance at the other man because if he did he would utterly lose what little composure he was clinging to. “Why,” he managed, voice a little strangled from swallowing back laughter as he extended the vowel sound into a drawn out question, “was anyone throwing their clothes anywhere?”

His mates shared a look, ears flicking too quickly to be easily read. If Anduin had ever wondered where his oldest sons’ had inherited the innocent look that bought their way out of trouble from, the evidence was sitting right in front of him, plastered all over their father and uncle as Ren and Hardwire turned back to him in synch. 

“Someone yelled ‘strip’,” Hardwire admitted, as though it were the most sensible answer in the world. “Seemed like a great idea at the time.”

“Everyone had something on below the waist,” Ren assured him reasonably. “But the crowd was pretty big and it was getting hot.”

Anduin held up the folded paper, waving it at them. “Indecent exposure,” he repeated. 

Hardwire snorted. “Not my fault that guardsman couldn’t tell the difference between my shorts and my fur.” He plucked at the hem of the garment in question which was, Anduin had to admit, very close in color to Hardwire’s dark brown fur. “Still had my belt on, what in hell did he think I was wearing?”

“Apparently just the belt,” Anduin replied dryly. He folded his arms, leaning one shoulder against the heavy wrought iron bars that covered the front of the cell. “Resistance to authority?”

“Oh, _always_ ,” Ren piped up, snorting a laugh. Hardwire grinned, broad and amused.

“That’s me we’re talking about, right? Not my fault he couldn’t take a joke. Told him if he didn’t believe me, he could grab my ass and make sure for himself.”

Shaw made a sound as though he were choking, muffling it hastily in his fist. Anduin hid his own smile behind the piece of paper, tapping it idly against his lips. “I think we can disregard the charges of resistance,” he said when he could trust his voice to be steady. “I know what you’re capable of, and there was no property damage or injury. The guards aren’t chosen for their senses of humor, but they should know better than to try to press charges for a bit of mouthing off.” Hardwire’s grin was all tooth. “Or swearing,” Anduin amended. “Or insults, no matter how loudly yelled.”

“There remains the question,” he continued dryly, ignoring how his mates were both unbearably smug, “of who instigated breaking and entering the Trade District auction house, after hours, and then invited a hundred more people than the building’s actual capacity to a drunken dance party that could be heard clear in the _Cathedral District._ ”

Ren just shrugged. “Like I said, party was already going when we got there,” Hardwire said. 

“It was a good party,” Ren added, earnestly. “And they already had kegs set up out in the square for the people watching the fireworks.”

“Be that as it may,” Shaw sighed, “do you have any idea who organized it?”

Hardwire shook his head, sitting back against the stone with his arms crossed. Ren tilted his head to his cousin, then rolled his eyes when Hardwire rumbled something indistinct in Pandaren. “So you can arrest them or recruit them?” he asked bluntly. 

“Mostly so we can figure out how they did it,” Anduin said truthfully. “Given the lack of property damage I’m disinclined to push it into the courts, but the guards get understandably nervous when they don’t know how something got past them.”

The cousins shared another glance and Hardwire relented, his posture softening. “The Worgen calling the dance sets was a mage,” he admitted. “She’d yell out the set and if you were part of it then suddenly you’d be up on the dais,” he snapped his fingers in emphasis, “like that. Lots of localized teleports.”

“Gnomes,” Ren added. “They had those music things, the ones with the songs recorded on scroll, set up. I’m not sure if all the colored lighting was Gnome or magic.”

“A sable furred female Worgen mage,” Anduin mused, “and Gnomes. Master Shaw?”

Shaw straightened. “Yes, Sire?”

“Check with the guards and see if anyone matching those descriptions ended up in the cells,” Anduin directed mildly. “Tell Captain Malendey to start processing the release of everyone picked up last night, unless there was violence involved. And you might want to pass on a message with regards to some further training in racial recognition for the human guards.”

“Like the difference between cloth and fur?” Shaw snorted. “Yes, sir.”

“Exactly,” Anduin agreed, letting himself grin in answer to his mates’ chuckles. He held out his hand to Shaw, palm up. “Keys, please.”

There was a moment of hesitation, just one heartbeat too long. Anduin slanted his glance sideways to catch the flicker of conflicted expression on the face of the head of SI:7. “…sir?”

“Keys,” Anduin clarified, smiling pleasantly. “The ones you lifted from the good Captain when we came in,” he clarified, and had to raise his voice over Ren’s startled bark of mirth and Hardwire’s deeper rolling laugh. “Because you couldn’t help yourself and I’m surrounded by thieves, reprobates, and drunks. Keys, please?”

Shaw looked rather like he’d been caught with his hand in a cookie jar, consternation and irritation chasing each other across his face before he settled on a grudging ghost of a smile and dug out a heavy ring of keys to drop into Anduin’s hand. “Good to see you’ve been keeping up your lessons, your Majesty.”

“Observation only,” Anduin demurred, grinning. “I couldn’t have lifted them. Tell the Captain I have them, and remind him he has a spare set, if you please.”

“Yes, sir,” Shaw confirmed smoothly. Anduin waited until the other man had disappeared around the bend in the corridor before he lifted the keys, flicking through them to find the correct one.

“That was cruel,” Ren said, still chuckling.

Anduin snorted. “That was revenge,” he corrected, “for waking me up pounding on the door like something was on fire. And if he’s going to perpetuate that ridiculous game of who can get the better of whom that SI:7 plays with the guard, he deserves to be called on it. Ah, here we are,” he finished, sliding one of the keys into the lock of the cell door. It turned smoothly, with only a muted metal thunk, and Anduin hummed a pleased sound; maintenance was one of his standing directives, of both the people and equipment that formed the backbone of Stormwind’s military. 

His mates climbed to their feet, brushing off straw. Anduin swung the door open and fumbled beneath his cloak, tugging free two lengths of cloth he had tucked into his belt. Quick motions bundled each one up, tossing them to their respective owner with an easy accuracy that caught his Consort full in the face. Hardwire manage to bring his hands up fast enough to catch his, grin flashing.

Ren pulled the bundle off of his ears and shook it out to reveal one of his own shirts. He snorted, amused. “No pants?”

“If you’re going to get me up at this hour to get you out of the Stockades,” Anduin said, grinning as he leaned against the open doorway, “then I think walking across the city in your shorts is a minor enough price to pay. Especially,” he added pointedly, “since you could have gotten out at any point. _Your Highness_.”

Ren snorted, pulling the shirt on over his head and tugging his braid free. “What, and spend two hours convincing them I really am the Royal Consort, only for them to send a runner to the castle to wake you up at an even worse hour to confirm it? Catching some sleep sounded like a better idea.”

“Dry,” Hardwire agreed, “and warmer than outside. And they keep the place fairly clean. I’ve slept in worse.” He grinned, tugging down the hem of the sleeveless tunic that barely came to his hips. “What would you have done if we really didn’t have our shorts on?”

“Enjoyed watching you walk back to the castle even more,” Anduin replied blandly without hesitation. He relented a moment later with a shake of his head, chuckling. “Or imposed on a mage for a portal, I suppose.” He glanced down the corridor but it was quiet, the occupants of the cells further down still either asleep or passed out - he had counted a number of Humans and Kel’dorei, neither of which had a Pandaren’s tolerance for the amount, or mixture, of alcohols that had been confiscated during the arrest. 

Stepping into the cell, he reached for Ren first, drawing his mate in for a kiss, then pulled Hardwire in for the same. “Did you have fun?”

Ren chuckled, slipping a hand around Anduin’s waist to pull him between them. Anduin sighed happily, closing his eyes and leaning into the familiar feel of being surrounded by their solidity and warmth. “It was a lot of fun,” Ren said, nuzzling Anduin’s hair. “Shame you weren’t with us.”

Hardwire rumbled an agreement, his touch light against Anduin’s face. “And you don’t have to come get us, cub, no matter what knots Shaw is tying himself in.”

“Of course I don’t have to,” Anduin agreed with a smile, opening his eyes to meet his mate’s. “But I always will.” He tilted his head up for another kiss, sinking his fingers into the tangled length of Hardwire’s hair and the shorter, smoother plush of Ren’s fur. Anduin laughed softly when they let him breathe, the ridiculousness of it all bubbling up to mix with love and humor, his grin turning upwards in a way that he rarely allowed himself. 

“So,” he drawled, teasing, “this was a fun first morning of the new year. Is this how the entire _rest_ of the year is going to go?”


End file.
